[280/366] video game audio description

This article shows every sign of not being written by a visually impaired or even disabled person ("Audio description, as a concept, has been a fixture in movies and TV shows for decades" ("decades"?)..."those who are either blind or visually impaired ("or"?)...keeps calling things "annotated" rather than described..."It is strange to consider that for decades, publishers scarcely paid mind to the reality that there are many avid gamers who do not see very well, or are hard of hearing, or have difficulty manipulating a joystick") but other than that, I think it's really interesting.

Much as I love audio description, it never even occurred to me to expect it in video games (except from diffrentcolours, bless him, who tries to keep me from feeling left out by narrating what he's up to). It seems like a huge endeavor, because it is:

Games are dynamic. Players wander around open worlds at their own pace; they pick flowers, smelt ore, and discover Korok seeds. No two combat encounters are exactly the same. It's an onerous job to fill in the details of a two-hour movie or a season of television for visually impaired folks, but it's at least easy to storyboard and conceptualize. Doing the same for say, a 40 hour Assassin's Creed campaign plus sidequests and collectables would require reinventing the wheel entirely.

The idea that an audio describer could read and react to everything Ellie does as she skulks around Seattle? That would require an inordinate amount of time, effort, and problem-solving. Descriptive Video Works is a company that's used to getting a call from a client at the last minute. If they were to truly imbue a new game with a harmonious A.I. narrator for the blind, that would require their service to be a core priority for the developer -- long before they started generating enough assets for a trailer.

I don't know what's going on with that last sentence there -- stop saying "the blind" you weirdo, and also why is it an AI narrator all of a sudden? -- but it makes a realy good point: accoriding to this article a couple of new games have audio-described trailers and that's just like any TV/movie job for audio describers. The article even says DVW were called in at the last minute to do one of them. Audio description for movies and TV, and trailers, can be and is done as an afterthought tacked onto (what's considered) a finished audiovisual product (by a prevailing culture that doesn't care if it's accessible). That just will not work if a whole game is going to be described. The accessibility is going to have to be much more integrated.

I'm really curious to see how that turns out, which will take a few years at least. It intrigues me partly because I was surprised at how...emotional?...I got just glancing at all the accessibility options for The Last of Us 2. The game isn't my genre at all -- the one thing 2020 hasn't lacked is emotionally harrowing content! -- but in a way that was good because I could just be overwhelmed on one axis at a time, like I could think well, I don't care about this game so I can just care about these accessibility options. And I cared a lot: there were so many options that I actually wonder if part of my emotions were just that kind of anxiety I get when my brain is overwhelmed (this is a super-fun and super-useful thing it does, thanks brain).

But some of it was genuine emotion too. At the time I wrote "I've always thought of video games as Not My Thing but is that really an inherent fact about me or them or my relation to them? Or is it just that everything since Tetris has been too inaccessible? It's weird to think that a whole entertainment media I'd written off decades ago might not always be off-limits and thus uninteresting for me." Because "I don't like video games" has been sufficient for me to write off all video games since 8-bit that I had to stop and consider whether that was really true or whether I'd just never had the chance to find out.

And getting to have a reaction to something that no longer has to be mediated by a barrier, something there previously had been no point getting personally invested in because of that barrier...even just speculating that the barrier might be removed can be a hell of an emotional experience, as many disabled people could tell you.